The present invention relates to a surface defect data display and management system for managing data concerning defects of a pattern formed on the surface of a planar substrate such as a semiconductor wafer and a method of displaying and managing surface defect data.
Foreign matters on the surface of a wafer and defects of a circuit pattern as well which take place in the semiconductor production steps are responsible for causes of a faulty semiconductor product such as an integrated circuit manufactured from the semiconductor wafer. Accordingly, in the semiconductor production line, the foreign matters on the wafer surface and circuit pattern defects (hereinafter referred to as “surface defects” or simply “defects”) are detected and besides, the defect occurrence condition is quantified with a view to constantly monitoring the condition of the production steps. Further, it has also been practice to confirm whether or not the surface defect has a fatal influence upon the semiconductor product by observing the shape or contour of the surface defect in detail.
The work of observing the surface defect has hitherto been carried out with the help of human eye but lately, through techniques of automatic defect review (ADR) and automatic defect classification (ADC) using the computer aided image processing technique, the defect size, shape and kind have been able to be decided automatically (see JP2007-040910A1 and JP2007-184565A1, for example).
Thanks to the automatic function as above, a large amount of defect data can be acquired within a short period of time and consequently, causes of surface defect to be searched can be narrowed down efficiently. But when the wafer surface defect is much more fatal so as to largely affect the production yield of a final product such as an integrated circuit, the final confirmation of the surface defect cannot help relying on the human eye. Accordingly, the frequency by which the engineer or operator observes defects with a review system or has another look at images the review system has automatically captured is not always reduced.
On the other hand, in the review system, the performance such as sensitivity of a detector has been improved and various functions have been becoming sophisticated. Therefore, the load imposed on the engineer or operator engaged in operation of the review system rather increases. For mitigation of the load, an example of an expedient which manages to realize improvements in operability of operations ranging from the defect observation to the image collation and carried out reiteratively in defect analysis by contriving the graphical user interface (GUI) is disclosed in JP 2006-173589A1, for example.